pillars of eternity what to do with the souls
I recently finished Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity,their Kickstarter-funded videogame that deliberately hearkens dorsum to the 90s and Interplay's computer RPG classics,Planescape: Torment andBaldur's Gate, and I think I have three or iv posts' worth of cloth I'd similar to talk virtually from that experience. Afterward, I'll discuss the game'southward gods, the pattern and writing of the NPC companions, and what I didn't like about the game. Today, I'll discuss the game's catastrophe, in the context of Eugene Thacker'south writings about life inStarry Speculative Corpse.Equally I hope was implied by saying that I'grand going to discuss the game's ending, there will be spoilers.
Function I:Pillars of Eternity and a few good souls
Start, let'south talk plot. This is going to involve heavy consultation of the game's wiki, as I can never remember whatever names in a work of fiction as shortly equally I finish existence engaged with it. In the 90s, I filled up my head with the name of Curiosity characters, and lost the ability to retain any others. Information technology'due south a shame, merely at least I'll never forget the likes of Joseph, Adam X, and Maggott.
In the game, you lot can choose your character's race, gender, and profession, which occasionally impact more than simply combat, only in general you play a blank slate. Y'all have emigrated to Dyrwood at the promises of a new life, only things immediately get rather sour: first, Dyrwood itself is suffering from the Hollowborn Plague–children are existence born without souls, and living their entire lives in a vegetative state.The cause is unknown, but a leading theory is that it'due south the fault of animancers, scientists/wizards who study and perform magic on souls–there's a lot of them in Dyrwood, every bit its relatively wild state means there's less regulation than in some countries. Only regardless of what's causing it, it'southward happening, and no one seems to know how to stop it.
Only before you lot can even get aware of any of that, you lot're caught in a storm that kills the residue of your caravan, and witness a strange magical rite performed by a homo you'll eventually acquire is named Thaos. There'southward an blow, and you're granted the powers of a Watcher–someone who can perceive and affect the souls of others. It also turned y'all into an awakened soul, which ways that you have visions of your past life, which is non so skilful, as those visions may eventually bulldoze yous insane. Then your starting marching orders–in one case you've figured out what a Watcher is–is to track downwardly Thaos and get him to reverse the process.
That'south more or less the state of things at the finish of Deed I. Throughout the game, you become more visions of the past, until you can more or less piece the whole thing together. Thaos, in the long by, was the leader of a religious Inquisition bent on destroying a heretic named Iovara and her followers. Your by cocky was caught between them, as a loyal member of Thaos' Inquisition, but also someone close to Iovara. Ultimately, y'all (without any choice in the matter by the player) betray Iovara, and she dies, tortured simply unrepentant.
At present, though, Thaos is running a dissimilar scam, in bunco with Woedica, goddess of justice, vengeance, and oaths. Skipping over a lot, the endgame plot revolves around two revelations. Start is what led Iovara to rebel; more on that next post. Second is Thaos' scheme. He'due south the one who caused the Hollowborn Plague (remember that, from four paragraphs ago?), in role to whip up mistrust regarding the animancers, just also so that he can inject all that unborn children soul goodness direct into Woedica to make her an ubergoddess. (As a quick aside, I kind of liked that plot evolution– it reminded me a lot of the way Neil Gaiman's American Godsshakes out. And it sets the stakes here–not the stop of the world, only a reckoning for a pair of thieves.) Naturally, it'd be a pretty poor graphic symbol arc on your part if he got abroad with this, so there'southward the traditional terminate boss fight.
The fight itself isn't 2 bad–it's Thaos and two behemothic animated statues. The only existent catch is that as Thaos' health goes down, he moves his soul into the statues, which makes his torso invincible. And so until I tweaked onto that (or, cough, read information technology in a wiki) I had diverted a 3rd of my forces to attacking the invulnerable graphic symbol. Once that was straightened out, he went down pretty quickly.
You're immediately given a option on what to do with Thaos, which is an interesting set of options:
Hither, Pillars of Eternity hearkens back to its predecessors, which also gave the actor a diverseness of choices to brand in the finales, choices that spoke virtually to what sort of graphic symbol the role player envisions she's playing. Particularly interesting to me is that options 2 and 5 are the same upshot, merely allow you lot to cull different motivations. I went with 4, by the way. I was roleplaying every bit a pretty white hat character. I think a contributing gene is that, as far as RPG villains go, Thaos tended not to act directly on us. Yes, he harmed someone close to the player, but that was another life entirely, and yes, he caused the hollowing and a ceremonious war (I skipped that part), simply for the most part, he'due south kept pretty far from the PC for nigh of the game. I call up that distance fabricated it easier for me to skip over the more vengeful options.
Some other way of looking at information technology, though, is that this choice is sort of a do run for the game's actual terminal selection. If those stolen souls aren't going to Woedica, where are they going to get? The choice is yours:
So. You can let the souls re-enter the bicycle of nativity and decease, which will end the Hollowing, just leave all the soulless children empty husks. You lot can send the souls back into the children–but that will admittedly destroy the parents who made the very hard choice of ending their soulless children. Y'all tin remove the souls from the cycle birthday, thus speeding up the gradual entropy of existence–an odd choice, but hey, information technology's ok for things to terminate some twenty-four hours. You tin can take the souls and employ them to empower the people of Dyrwood–strengthening the people who remain there. Just before you go the choices, Woedica bids you to take Theos' place as her favorite, and just give her the souls as originally planned–you tin can, if you want. (It's clearly the "evil" pick, but you tin can.) And finally, yous can permit the souls go where they may,any that may entail–it'due south the randomizer option, basically. Regardless of which pick you make, the Hollowborn Plague ends, and so the real choice is, again, what ending you feel best suits your character, every bit you've been playing information technology.
Really, it's not quite that elementary–each option is ane that is favored by one of the chief deities of the gameworld, and, in fact, to get the concluding dungeon, you have to promise one of four gods that you'll definitely take one of the first iv options. But more on that next mail. For now, permit's take a footstep dorsum. This terminal choice is about choosing what happens to a set of souls, to lifeforce. But what is life?
Part II: Philosophy, Lovecraft-manner
This, finally, is where the theory part of the post comes in. Eugene Thacker'south three volume Horror of Philosophy serial is concerned with thinking through the things that are, for one reason or some other, beyond our ability to grasp entirely, often considering they're things we can't experience. We can't know start hand, for example, exactly what an globe without humans on information technology would look like.
Volume ii is specifically looking at these concepts in terms of how philosophers throughout history have handled these issues. The first chapter offers a sample with a trifecta of well-known philosophers: Descartes' theory of being is riddled with all the places where our firsthand cognition fails, and uncertainty about the beingness around us rules; Kant's depression, Thacker argues, may stalk from the realization that mastery of reason may not coincide with the self-mastery of ourselves as human being beings, that rational thinking may not always be in the favor of humanity; Nietzsche'due south frequently pessimistic writings are often openly contemptuous of humanity's self-aggrandizing. Later chapters look into specific issues: darkness and blackness through early on Christian mystics; nothingness through the Japanese buddhist Kyoto school; and life itself.
In comparison to emptiness and darkness, life might seem similar a strange choice for Thacker'southward written report. Simply Thacker argues that our typical conception of life is always in terms of abundance–life is "generative, proliferating, productive and reproductive." It's thought of equally affirmative, and every bit with many affirmations in western philosophy, nosotros care for its opposing negation equally something subsumed in it–in this case, it'southward a truism that decease is a part of life, and we have concepts like the circle of life (thanks, Panthera leo Male monarch) to reinforce that subsuming. To bring it back to Pillars of Eternity, life every bit affidavit tin can be idea of as the option to return the souls to cycle. Just what happens if nosotros treat life equally if constituted non by affirmation but negation?
I imagine there's got to be something of an answer to this question in Thacker'south earlier book, After Life. But in the text at hand, he speaks to the event as well. Going equally far back to Aristotle, life is often thought of as a full general life-force, Life with a capital Fifty, whereas every living creature manifests some facet of Life, but not its entirety. So how do we know anything nearly Life if it isn't the living experience of any ane being or collection of beings, and isn't reducible just to those beings either? To quote Thacker:
In brusque, it would seem that the life common to all living beings is ultimately enigmatic and inaccessible to thought, since any given example of the living (as subject or object) is not life-in-itself, just only ane manifestation of life. Information technology seems that at that place is some remainder zone of inaccessibility that at once guarantees that in that location is a life-in-itself for all instances of the living, while also remaining, in itself, utterly obscure.
Thacker is arguing that Life, something nosotros have for granted as being integral to human beings and, you know, living, is in some sense beyond our ability to grasp in its entirety. Life is everywhere, but inaccessible in full.
That's the typical view of Life, what Thacker calls the generosity of life. He splits information technology into variations: life every bit genesis, where Life is the wellspring from which living things flow. Life is givenness, where Life is the process continually given for living things to exist (again, the bicycle perspective). The generosity form and then allows united states of america to excogitate of ascensionism, raising Life upward to a "metaphysical principle," which allows us to brand assumptions like the earth itself being alive, or life being all that comprises the world. The problem Thacker sees with all this affirmative life, though, is that leads us to romanticizing Life equally a force of good in itself, and tin exist totalized every bit such as a force humanity can harness and apply when necessary.
This criticism leads back to Thacker's original question. If Life as affirmation is limiting, what can we exercise with Life every bit negation? For this, he turns to German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. I'g glossing over quite a bit, just Schopenhauer depicts life as a sort of by product or upshot of the general inaccessibleness of everything:
Equally the will is in the affair-in-itself, the inner content, the essence of the world, but life, the visible world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the volition, this earth volition accompany the will as inseparably as a body is accompanied by its shadow; and if will exists, and so life, the earth, will be. Therefore life is certain to the will-to-live…
To Thacker, this principle hinges on three concepts. First, to Schopenhauer, the man body is the nexus of Representation and Will–where representation refers to everything we perceive, and Will to, well, everything else. Life, he (Schopenhauer) argues, is non then much a part of feel, simply of Will. Farther, Volition is driven past negation–it "asserts itself through contradictions, oppositions, subtractions, and its limit is the cocky-negation of life, through life." Because the Will past definition lies outside of our power to reason it, nosotros tin can only understand what information technology isn't. Thus, Life as regards Will, the Will-to-Life, is that attribute of life which is defined by an indifference to humanity. Thacker notes that this all leads Schopenhauer to what Thacker calls a cosmic cynicism, where "the whole world, similar man himself, is through and through will and through and through representation, and across this at that place is cypher."
Thacker build from this bespeak to his concept of catholic pessimism, but I retrieve that's far enough to go for our purposes. I wouldn't say Thacker'southward philosophical musing explain Pillars of Eternity. I'd lean a bit more towards proverb that Pillars of Eternity explains some of Thacker's musings. For the moment, though, I want to consider how the ii works play off each other.
Office Three: Putting the Pieces Together
Allow's revisit Thaos.
As this screenshot suggests, Thaos would find Schopenhauer's and Thacker's philosophies repulsive. The idea that there may not exist any meaning to life, that the globe and existence and life are all indifferent to the private human is abhorrent to him on every level. He maintains that without a firm affidavit that our existence has a purpose, humanity would destroy itself. (Ok, humanity is the wrong term, considering there'due south also elves, dwarves, and various other species.)To him, religion is necessary because it grants man a purpose, and the lengths to which he goes to in order to maintain that purpose is something we can talk about next mail.
Moving dorsum to the main topic, Pillars of Eternity is taking some very interesting stances in regards to Life, which match up only in parts to the forms Thacker describes. First, Life as in "life force" isn't some vague, ethereal concept for the people of Eora like it is for us–they know the soul exists, because Watchers tin meet them, and animancers tin can magick them. They know the bike exists, because Watchers tin can tap into by lives. Although perhaps it's fairer to say that the animancers and Watchers know that these things exist–everyone else has to have their word for it, which leads to many different cultural substantiations of trust and mistrust. And on that level, the game is useful, equally information technology offers a more in-depth expect at what happens when the ideas Thacker is discussing are brought to the forefront of every twenty-four hours life. (small l, not Life). And fifty-fifty in fictional form, that'due south nice to see; one of the flaws I retrieve in discussing philosophy regarding the inconceivable is that it frequently ignores how these discussions bear upon people.
And yet, Eora is more complicated than us, every bit well. The heed-body problem isn't some abstract sectionalisation for them. Cheers to the Hollowborn Plague, the people of Dyrwood have received a front row lesson on how soul and trunk tin exist divided, and the tragedy of what happens when torso exists without soul. Simply that raises further questions–if the soul and torso can be split, where is the private life? The soulless children are alive, in the sense that they breathe, fall asleep, can be exhorted into eating, and then forth. Is that enough? Is life and soul the same thing, or is in that location some significant difference?
Let's revisit those soul choices. To spare you from constant scrolling, hither they are over again:
Offset, all of these options go against the life as negation view in one significant way–information technology's the histrion's choice what happens. That is, man agency through the actor is front end and eye every bit the force that moves the game world. In general, well-nigh, if non all, videogames spend a lot of rhetorical capital in cementing that notion, that the actor grapheme is the almost important existence in the gameworld, for at to the lowest degree as long as the game at paw goes on. That positioning radically changes Thacker's philosophies, from an in-game perspective at least. (Sidenote 1: for an example of a story that hinges on this concept, think Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Zaphod Beeblebrox, who survives the total perspective vortex, but only because the universe he was in at the time was designed expressly for him) (Sidenote ii: videogames are a useful variant for Thacker's philosophy of horror, I remember–on the 1 hand, they're designed for the player. On the other, there are always going to be significant aspects of the game that are kept from the player's purview. Videogames cater to the illusion of control more to control itself.)
The possible exception is the terminal option, to let the souls to disperse where they may. Even so, there's complications–it'south still your choice to put that roulette bike in motion, and, equally with all the choices, information technology'due south presented as one favored by a detail god–Wael, god of dreams, secrets, mysteries, and revelations.
The imagery Wael offers is that the souls will dispersed ala Johnny Appleseed–random scatterings that are placed where they land, and may thus acquit new fruits. On the one paw, information technology'south the only choice that breaks away from human conclusion, but on the other, information technology's nevertheless catering to the notion of life as genesis, that the souls will create these new mysteries. That'due south significant, I recall. Of the options Thacker outlines, it doesn't have to exist either/or; there can be a lilliputian chip of life as generative strength, AND life equally utterly beyond human grasp.
Options i and 2–return the souls to the wheel, or render them to the soulless children however, uh, alive (at that place's that term slippage once more) are peradventure illustrative of the life as giveness concept, where Life is that which is continually given to living things–the departure hither is whether you grant them to the already living, or those yet to exist born. Option ii, I should note, is the one I picked, and to be honest, these two were the just two I actually considered. Going utterly against any of Thacker'due south precepts, I fabricated my decision entirely based on humans already living and who could have lived, deciding that it was only "off-white" that they be given back the chance that was taken from them. The just thing that made me uncertain and pushed me towards pick 1 was that two was going to cause incredible amounts of suffering to the parents who didn't keep their soulless children, and that the children themselves were going to have very rough lives–would they be infants in bodies a decade old? Would that make things worse? And in that location'south too some idea inherent in my choice that possessing life is similar possessing property–exercise the living take a "right" to own the lives that Thaos took from them, and does my selection imply that I believe that? (Well, no, I don't think I do believe that, but it's a question that arises.)
Options 4 and 5–to give the souls to Woedica, or use them to strengthen the souls already in Dyrwood) complicate what life means in Eora even farther. The notion of a cycle, and that people can access memories from their past lives, suggests that souls are indivisible, and unique. In item, it suggests a directly connection between life, in its individual substantiation, and Life, where Life is more or less the composite of all lives inside the soul cycle. But options iv and 5 belie that notion. If you can accept the souls that have been torn out through the Hollowborn Plague and just invest them in another being… well, what happens to that being? Does it become more than powerful, ala Jet Li's the I? Is having a bunch of souls equivalent to being really good for you, then? Is the person infused a new person entirely? Practice they acquit the memories of the other souls' past lives, or are the souls dispersed amid the various Dyrwood folk?
Well, we don't have to leave these as rhetorical questions, not entirely, anyway. The game's endings brandish text that briefly corresponds to the endings the player chooses. Choosing to give the souls to Dyrwood makes the inhabitants more generally resistant and willing to conduct on–which carries its own assumptions about the nature of life, depicting information technology as a rather literal version of Schopenhauer'due south Will-to-Life. Choosing to give them to Woedica doesn't appear to have whatever result at all beyond fixing her statue, though there's a hint of something more than ominous to come up.
Finally, nosotros accept choice three, to extinguish the souls. Arguably, this pick is both the uttermost and the closest to what Thacker calls a negation of life. Information technology'due south the farthest, because it'southward expressed in terms of a loss; the souls are a net gain on the balance book of the universe, and thus their dispersal is a loss and the advocacy of entropy. Further, in the description of the game endings, this extinguishing is framed equally a peaceful residue, which contains its own life-affirming aspects. Just at the aforementioned time, to cull it as your selection, to human activity as if that's the best course of activeness, is to act against the principle that life in and of itself is the ultimate good. It could take been very easy to bandage this every bit an "evil" option, but the game doesn't impose that kind of judgment on it.
Thacker's discussion on Life doesn't "solve" Pillars of Eternity or vice versa. Instead, I think they both illustrate how complicated our concept(s) of life tin can be, that it's possible to conceive of ways of budgeted life beyond black and white abundance and absenteeism. And that we have avenues to do this in both philosophy books and videogames is pretty great, I think.
Source: https://literallygames.wordpress.com/2015/08/24/pillars-of-eternity-always-recycle-your-souls/
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